


the night is softly, sweetly calling

by callunavulgari



Series: the one where the Hales are related to the Addams [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Alive Hale Family, Alternate Universe - Addams Family Fusion, Alternate Universe - Canon, Crossover, M/M, Rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 05:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21094292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: Here’s the thing that Stiles never tells the Hales: his mother was strange too.Not the way that they were strange. His mother couldn’t peel back the skin of her hands just to see how the muscles shivered, the way the bones flexed. She didn’t stir arsenic into her coffee or mix rat poison into the pancakes. She never let Stiles play with snakes as a child, or threw him into the lake just to get him clean.But she did sometimes listen, like she heard things that weren’t there, and sometimes, if he was very good, she told him stories.





	the night is softly, sweetly calling

**Author's Note:**

> Day 18 of October. Prompts were: buried, stars, trapdoor, gifted, “What’s done cannot be undone,” cathedrals, and grow.
> 
> So, here's the thing. Through the years, a lot of people have asked me to continue this series. And I always meant to, but then as the years wore on, things changed. My writing style is different, I fell most of the way out of the Teen Wolf fandom, and I was afraid that if I wrote this, it wouldn't feel like part of the same series. And in a lot of ways, I was right. The previous two works, for all that they're Addams level of morbidity, were a cheerful sort. Writing Stiles instead of Derek was the easiest way to come back to this verse and have the different style be more meaningful than jarring.
> 
> I have ideas for a final part of this, but I won't promise anything, because who knows. Two Stiles parts to two Derek parts feels meaningful and right, but I'm not sure how to twist canon into the right shape for what I want. But, we'll see. And to every single one of you that has written a comment asking for more since 2014... this is for you.

Here’s the thing that Stiles never tells the Hales: his mother was strange too.

Not the way that they were strange. His mother couldn’t peel back the skin of her hands just to see how the muscles shivered, the way the bones flexed. She didn’t stir arsenic into her coffee or mix rat poison into the pancakes. She never let Stiles play with snakes as a child, or threw him into the lake just to get him clean.

But she did sometimes listen, like she heard things that weren’t there, and sometimes, if he was very good, she told him stories.

When the nogitsune creeps into his skin, it feels like a story she told him once. She’d never outright told him that ghosts were real. Demons never came up in day to day conversation, but if he thinks about it really hard, the stories she told when he was a child weren’t exactly normal.

She told him about things finding a way inside, curling up in your guts like a cat trying to get warm. She told him about houses with chicken legs and a candle that could burn an entire family to ash.

The nogitsune is like that. It speaks in riddles that he half knows already, and when it makes his body walk, Stiles can almost remember the feel of something else moving him.

Peter had always said that Stiles was strange, that he was different. But with the Hales and the Addams, what was Stiles, really, except normal?

Derek catches on the fastest, but Stiles always knew he would.

So the nogitsune needs to get him away. It feeds off of chaos and pain, and Derek doesn’t feel that the way normal people do, so it takes him to the hospital, and slaughters an entire ward. It doesn’t feel good. People die all the time, but Stiles has never killed a person before. He watches the blood slick his hands and thinks about stopping it. Screams, not because he’s frightened, but because he’s angry.

If he were a Hale, he thinks, this never would have happened. If he were Derek, he probably could have opened himself up and scooped the creature out.

But he isn’t a Hale, so he waits.

And when it’s over, he keeps that anger, stokes the fire in his breastbone higher and higher, until he is the candle, until everything inside him feels like it may turn to ash.

And then he looks Derek in the face, and says, “I want to be different. Make me different. You can do that, can’t you?”

And Derek looks at him for a minute, and nods.

The Addams family residence is something out of one of his mother’s stories. The spires soar towards the sky. The porch creaks. The guillotine gleams. The swamp out back sometimes stretches its brackish wet fingers into their yard, past where the cypress trees stop and green grass begins.

It is a story, the best kind of story, because it’s real.

Derek takes him there, where his family greets them both with open arms. They bring Stiles’s dad this time, and the look on his face when Talia smiles mysteriously at him and lets the door swing open is… something.

Stiles had tried to bring him up to speed on the drive down. He’d used a chess board, precariously balanced on his knees. It probably would have been better if he’d used something else. If he’d written it down like another story, like the books that his mother had written that are gathering dust in their attic, but he hadn’t had enough time for all that.

“John,” Talia says, nodding to him as he steps past her.

His dad’s eyes are wide, and Stiles can see all the strange places where his attention is snagging - the cobwebbed dining room table, the strange grandfather clock in the foyer that eternally drips blood and crows at the hour with the sounds of hell.

Wednesday and Pugsley are in the dining room, watching them. When his dad isn’t looking, Stiles winks at Wednesday, charmed when she winks back.

“Welcome to our home,” Gomez bellows, and Stiles’s dad jumps. Gomez has that effect on people.

“Glad to be here,” his dad murmurs, but he doesn’t sound too sure of that.

Stiles steps forward, nudging his shoulder against his dad’s. It’s a reminder, that he’s not alone in this. That he isn’t the only ‘normal’ person standing in this house.

Before they’d left, Derek had let Stiles use a knife to split open the insides of his forearm. His dad had not reacted well, shouting and bolting out of his seat so quickly that it flipped over backwards and landed on their kitchen floor with a crash. But Stiles had grabbed hold of his dad’s wrists before he’d made it all the way to Derek, and said, “Watch.”

His dad had watched. Stiles had felt the rabbit-like thrum of his pulse through his wrist, had felt that panic before himself. But he’d watched, and when Derek’s skin was all shiny and new again, he’d made them try it again.

This time, he’d gutted Derek, hip to hip, like a caesarean section. There was no arguing out of that.

It made the chess board schtick easier, at least.

When Morticia glides into the room, all smooth dark hair and flawless white skin, Stiles’s dad’s eyes somehow manage to go wider. She comes to a stop next to Stiles, and when her red lips quirk upwards into a smile, Stiles easily returns it. He’d missed her. Missed them all.

She lays a hand on his shoulder, dark nails long and pointed at the ends, like talons. “Are you sure about this, Stiles? What’s done cannot be undone.”

Stiles looks at her for a minute. They are all strangely silent - Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Talia, and Derek. He wonders where Laura and Cora are, where Derek’s dad is lurking. He wonders if this is something sacred for them, a rite that most mortals don’t get to see.

He remembers the nogitsune, the oily sheen of it just under his skin. The blood on his palms, the fireflies that turned into demons. Those fireflies had been born in his belly, nursed on Stiles’s blood and guts.

His mom wouldn’t have wanted this for him, he thinks. She’d appreciated normal, despite the stories. Stiles had seen that twitch of her head when she heard something that he couldn’t, saw her ignore it. Eventually though, her world had caught up with her. Driven her mad. Sometimes, if he’s honest with himself, he wonders if the sickness wasn’t something genetic at all, not the way the doctor’s explained it. If it was something that came out of the dark to take her back where she belonged.

“I’m sure,” he says, and in unison, they all nod.

The cathedral is just how he’d thought it would look. It’s decrepit, going to pieces in some places, and looks more like a mausoleum than… whatever it is.

There’s a basin full of blood just before the altar.

“The basin is just for show,” Laura tells him, popping into existence at his side. She’s a little bit more faded than she was the last time he’d seen her, grayer around the face, more transparent around the feet. But she still smiles like Laura, so he doubts it’s a big deal. Probably just a new trick she’d learned.

“How’s it for show?” he asks her, clenching his hands until his nails dig into the meat of his palms.

Her grin goes sharp around the edges, wolfish with delight. “You need to be completely submerged,” she says gleefully. “If you were a baby, the basin would work. It did for all of us.”

“Then how’s this going to work?”

Her grin widens. “There’s a bathtub out back.”

“It won’t be that bad,” Derek tells him reassuringly when she’s taken a swan dive through the floorboards again. He’s looking a little flushed around the cheeks, and Stiles knows it’s because Wednesday had him strung upside down in the shower earlier, bleeding out from a gash across his neck, so deep that the white gleam of vertebrae shown. He guesses that at least he knows what the blood was for now.

“My dad’s going to freak,” Stiles whispers, a giddy surge of something like hysteria creeping up on him.

Derek shrugs. “I think he’s been taking it pretty well. I walked in on my dad telling him stories earlier.”

“Stories,” Stiles muses. He can feel the ghost of his mother, the smell of her on the breeze. The Hales are wolf smells and the copper tang of blood not quite dry, but his mother is strange spices and the scent of a brisk winter, something cold and electric.

“Hey,” Derek says, catching hold of his elbow. “Are you going to be okay? You don’t have to do this - we can turn you the other way, if you think it’ll be easier.”

Stiles thinks about it, about being a wolf. But it’s not quite right. It doesn’t fit the narrative. He can be a Hale - an Addams, he thinks, but he knows that he can’t be a werewolf.

“No,” he says. There’s a whisper to the air, a ghost of a touch on the back of his neck. For all their strangeness, he has never once felt ill at ease in the presence of Derek’s family. But here, now, in this cathedral, with its broken stained windows with their warping, upside down images, he feels odd.

“Peter isn’t here, is he?” Stiles asks, half turning away from the basin of blood.

Derek’s face tightens. “No. He isn’t allowed.”

Stiles nods, but that too, feels strange. His mother’s magic had lain in words, in stories, and belief. She could either sense the dead or hear the echoes of something else, something bigger and altogether more terrifying, knocking on the door between worlds.

Stiles doesn’t have her magic. Not quite. But he thinks that he has something inside him. Words and belief make up a part of it, but there is also the knowing.

Peter is here. Stiles is sure of it.

“It’ll happen tomorrow?” he asks, licking his lips.

Beside him, Derek doesn’t seem to sense that anything is wrong. He’s squinting at a mother spider carrying her children on her back. Stiles had read somewhere about that species, about how the children would devour that mother in the end.

“The new moon,” Derek tells him. “For new beginnings.”

Stiles licks his lips. “All right.”

When Peter comes, Stiles is waiting for him. Dawn is spilling over the trees and the grass is still wet with dew. The rest of the house is inside, sleeping. When he sees Stiles sitting on the railing of the porch, he comes to a stop, blinking.

“I thought that I would have to spirit you away,” he says, approaching with a hint of trepidation. There’s suspicion lurking in his eyes, as if he’s expecting a trap.

Stiles shrugs. He _is_ the trap, but Peter doesn’t know that yet.

Peter considers him. He looks frustrated. “What _is_ it about you?”

Stiles jumps off the railing, landing lightly on the dew studded grass. It’s a move he couldn’t have made a year ago, not without stumbling or falling over his feet, but he makes it now, because he believes he can.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he says, giving Peter his best approximation of Morticia’s mysterious smile. He strides past him, heading towards the cathedral. “Come on, old man,” he calls. “Keep up.”

Peter follows him, and when they reach the cathedral, he’s still giving Stiles that same wary look, as if he isn’t the big bad wolf who’d planned on spiriting Stiles away. It’s quiet here, and when Stiles closes his eyes, he can hear the howl of a train.

“There’s a part of the ritual that they don’t know about?” Stiles asks, because he expects it.

Peter narrows his eyes. “There is a part of the ritual older than the one that they use. More effective. I think it would benefit you.”

“Benefit me?” Stiles asks him, a snap to his voice. “Or benefit you?”

For the first time since he arrived, Peter’s spine goes loose. He smiles at Stiles, that smarmy grin that Stiles remembers from when he’d wrapped a clawed hand around his wrist and asked if he wanted the bite.

“Both of us, I think,” he says, and Stiles thinks of the nogitsune again, its touch, how it had leached something from his heart that he’s yet to get back.

Peter creeps closer, until Stiles can feel his breath. “You know that you’re something else. With this part of the ritual, you will be powerful.”

“What if I don’t want to be powerful?” Stiles whispers. “What if I just want to be happy?”

He thinks of marrying Derek in a chapel full of sunlight and laughing people. Normal people. There’s cake and dancing and laughter, but it’s all wrong, because Derek’s side of the aisle is barren and empty, devoid of everyone who loved him.

“Do you really think you could live with being the normal one?” Peter asks, but his voice is distant, and when Stiles turns, he’s standing beside a trap door that he’s got flung open and waiting.

“I’ve never been the normal one,” Stiles tells him.

Peter smiles. “Today, I bury you. Tonight, you will be reborn.”

Stiles steps down into the dark, and Peter closes the door behind him.

There’s a trick to darkness. When you are absolutely, completely cut off from light, your eyes begin to see funny things. They pick out shapes in the black, movement just out of sight. So the trick is to keep your eyes closed. The dark behind your eyelids is friendly, familiar. The dark of an enclosed room is not.

The trap door hid a grave from view - a space hardly big enough to move in, where the dirt presses in around him, hugging tight to shoulders and hips.

Time has no meaning in the dark, so Stiles keeps his eyes closed and tells himself stories. He is different, he is also strange, and his mother left him something that wasn’t just a fear of madness. She left him a gift.

“Let there be light,” he whispers into the darkness, and at the tips of his fingers, something grows like a spark. Like a candle, made to burn the people who hurt him to ash.

Stiles smiles to himself, and smothers the flame. Just the memory of it is enough.

When Peter lets him out that night, there’s a dawning awareness in his expression. It’s a hungry sort of expression, a yearning for power that lead to Peter killing Laura. The Hales still don’t know why he did it, but Stiles thinks that he might know now. Peter killed her for her potential, stole the spark of alpha from inside her and made it his own, kindled it to life through sheer force of will.

“Better?” he asks, and Stiles doesn’t answer him. This is a sacred rite, and he doesn’t need Peter for this bit.

When he doesn’t answer, Peter huffs.

“Give my family my love,” he says, touching Stiles’s wrist lightly with thumb and forefinger. He is gone before Stiles can flinch away.

He’ll be back. He hasn’t gotten what he wants yet.

It’s an hour, maybe more before Derek and his family pour into the chapel. There’s something strange in Derek’s expression, and Stiles knows that he can smell Peter, that he’s wondering what he did, and if Stiles is okay.

They say a few words over the altar, and while Talia is speaking, Stiles takes Derek’s hand.

Stiles’s dad is quiet, watchful as they pour the basin over his head. When they lead him out back and his dad sees the tub full of blood, he flinches, like he wants to interrupt, wants to drag Stiles out of here.

Family, Stiles thinks, as they each touch him in turn. Derek’s parents, Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Cora. Even Laura sets her cool brow against his, flashing him a wicked, transparent smile before she makes room for Derek.

It’s a strange ritual, but these are strange people. He has watched them dismember one another, detach head and hearts and hands, watched them eat poison for the tingle down their throat, and drown themselves to chase the giddy feeling of surging back to life.

But they love, more deeply than most people Stiles knows. And they are part of his story.

The stars are bright above him in the seconds before he goes under. He watches them and thinks of his mother, can almost smell her on the wind again. The blood closes over his head, slicks his skin and coats the inside of his mouth.

Power, that’s what Peter had been after. There was something coming for him. A hunt. And Stiles thinks that it might be coming for him too.

A while ago, Derek had told him that sometimes he thought Stiles was more Addams than he was. But that wasn’t exactly true. Even before the nogitsune had ripped out pieces of him to make room for something growing, expanding, smoldering in his chest, Stiles had been something other. Something strange, but not strange the way the Hales were strange.

He was strange the way his mother was strange.

And now, he was strange the way that the Addams were too.

He surfaces. Above him the stars glitter, and he gasps for air.

He is reborn.

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](https://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/), if you dare.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] the night is softly, sweetly calling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21253406) by [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)


End file.
